This month marks the 190th anniversary of one of the most devastating disasters in New York City history — The Great Fire of 1835.
This massive fire, among the worst in American history in terms of its economic impact, devastated the city during one freezing December evening, destroying hundreds of shops and warehouses and changing the face of Manhattan forever.
It also underscored the city’s need for a functioning water system and permanent fire department.
So why were there so many people drinking champagne in the street? And how did the son of Alexander Hamilton save the day?
FEATURING Such Old New York sites as the Tontine Coffee House, Stone Street, Hanover Square and Delmonico’s.
To mark this special anniversary, we have newly remastered and edited our classic Bowery Boys podcast on this subject which was originally released on March 13, 2009
LISTEN HERE: THE GREAT FIRE THAT TRANSFORMED NEW YORK
At top: Nicolino Calyo captured the terrible sight of the blaze as it might have looked from Red Hook, Brooklyn
Before the blaze: Charming Wall Street in 1825, from a 1920s guide book. Prosperity from the Erie Canal was just around the bend. (Courtesy Ephemeral New York)
The original Merchant’s Exchange building, one of New York’s more ornate building, featuring a statue of Alexander Hamilton standing nobly in its rotunda. (Illustration courtesy the New York Public Library image gallery)
What’s the damage?: the red areas below indicate the blocks destroyed by the swift moving conflagration (map courtesy CUNY)
City officials, including mayor Cornelius Lawrence, could only watch and stare as the blaze over takes a stretch of prominent buildings. Also included below is Charles King, who watches as his newspaper the New York American is overcome by the fire.
Calyo’s painted depiction of the “Burning of the Merchant’s Exchange”
Another interpretation from the same angle — the futility of battling the blaze was chillingly illustrated from the corner Wall and William streets, where winds carried the flames from building to building, high above the heads of fighters below.
As the old Dutch Church on Garden Street caught fire, a morose parishioner mounted the organ and began playing a dirge. (Where’s Garden Street? According to Forgotten New York, Garden Street was “between William Street and Broadway, just south of Wall Street” and is now part of Exchange Place today.)
Aftermath at the Merchant’s Exchange. Many business owners actually tranferred their stock to the Exchange building, unfortunately thinking it would be impervious to the encroaching flames.
The devastation that met New Yorkers the following day led most to believe the city would never recover.
Most of the buildings on today’s Stone Street were built in the immediate years following the fire, Greek Revival-style countinghouses that are refitted for modern times as taverns and restaurants. It’s also one of the few cobblestone streets still around in the Financial District area.
And did you know there was also a terrible fire ten years later — in almost the same location? Check out my article on the Great Fire of 1845 — and these captivating illustrations by Currier and Ives:
In this Currier & Ives lithograph, the serene fountain in Bowling Green as flames consume buildings all around it.
Who exactly was Nicolino Calyo, the man who painted so many vivid pictures of the Great Fire?
Nicolino Vicomte de Calyo was a political dissenter who fled Italy in the 1830s and settled in Baltimore, becoming entranced by the new American landscape.
Although his most famous depictions of New York are of the city in flame, he also painted a few serene views (like the one below, a vantage of the harbor from Brooklyn Heights).
His works are in many New York museums, including the Burning of the Merchant’s Exchange which is at the Museum of the City of New York.
Another cool resource on the Great Fire is up at the CUNY website, with more pictures and more backstory as to New York’s capacity to fight blazes in the early 19th century.
FURTHER LISTENING
Other podcasts in our back catalog that relate to this week’s show:
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We’re also looking to improve and expand the show in other ways — publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are now a creator on Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators.
Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans.
If you’d like to help out, there are six different pledge levels.Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.
Detroit Publishing Company 1900, courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Eighteen years ago (officially on June 19, 2007) we recorded the very first Bowery Boys podcast, appropriately about Canal Street, the street just outside the window of Tom’s apartment on the Lower East Side.
(For more information, check out our 15th anniversary show from two years ago.)
We cannot have possibly imagined on that hot June night, wielding only a bad microphone, a new laptop and some reasonably interesting information about a terribly polluted water soure, that would still be doing this, stronger than ever.
Thank you, listeners and readers, for helping us celebrate almost four hundred years of history in the past seventeen.
Tom Meyers in Park Slope, recording our first ever ‘on location’ show in 2015.Greg in the stocks at Colonial Williamsburg, 2017. (Okay, not really a Bowery Boys thing, but history related.) Greg and Tom in Amsterdam, 2024
Here’s a new way to experience our old podcasts.
Below is our entire list* of shows, placed in a particular chronological order, based on a critical date in that subject’s history.
Viewing our back catalog of podcasts in this fashion, we hope that you can really start seeing the entire history of New York City emerging. To this day, there are some blatant holes in our historical coverage that we hope to close up in future shows.
So enjoy! And thank you all again.
*In the rare case where we revisited a subject (Flatiron Building, Canal Street) we only included the most recent show. For ‘rewind’ episodes with updates, they have been included over the original. And the first four episodes are not available (but those who support us on Patreon have access to episodes #2-4).
And finally — we can continue recording the Bowery Boys podcast thanks to the generous support of those on Patreon. Supporters receive bonus audio, free merchandise and first access to tickets for upcoming live shows.
Wall Street in 1847, German artist Augustus Köllner, from lithograph by Laurent Deroy
Wall Street, today a canyon of tall buildings in New York’s historic Financial District, is not only one of the most famous streets in the United States, it’s also a stand-in for the entire American financial system.
Wall Street in 1847, German artist Augustus Köllner, from lithograph by Laurent Deroy
One of the first facts you learn as a student of New York City history is that Wall Street is named for an actual wall that once stretched along this very spot during the days of the Dutch when New York was known as New Amsterdam.
The particulars of the story, however, are far more intriguing. Because the Dutch called the street alongside the wall something very different.
During the colonial era, the wall was torn down and turned into the center of New York life, complete with Trinity Church, City Hall and a shoreline market with a disturbing connection to one New York’s financial livelihoods — slavery.
So how did this street become so associated with American finance? The story involves Alexander Hamilton, a busy coffee house and a very important tree.
LISTEN NOW: HOW WALL STREET GOT ITS NAME
Map courtesy Wikimedia Commons: Featured on the map 1) Trinity Church 2) Bank of New York Building 3) NY Stock Exchange 4) Federal Hall 5) Trump Building 6) Cocoa ExchangeThe slave market was where the “Meal Market” is marked on the map.From Our Firemen: A History of the New York Fire Departments. Augustine E. Costello, 1887The Wall Street market which featured a slave market in 1711
FURTHER LISTENING:
After listening to the show about Wall Street, check back into these prior episodes for further adventures relating to this story.
This podcast is inspired by the article below, which ran in 2017 (and was itself based on an earlier article on this website).
A simplistic but colorful view of “Man Mados” or “New Amsterdam” in 1664 (click in to inspect the detail)
There was most definitely a walled fortification nearby on New
Amsterdam’s northern boundary, and it certainly did stretch along about
the same area as Wall Street does today.
But the present name seems to be a formation of mixed meanings that
only a tangle of languages and hundreds of years of history can create.
The Dutch themselves referred to an actual street alongside the
waterfront that ran up to and alongside the wall as the ‘Cingel’ —
according to old history, meaning “exterior, or encircling, street.”
This festive illustration from 1949, created for Old Dirck Storm’s Book, takes some liberties with the names and streets of New Amsterdam. For instance it applies De Wal Straat as the name of the street next to the wall. See this week’s show for how this confusion came to be.
But ‘De Waal Straat’, as it was also known, was also the center of a
small Walloon community in New Amsterdam, and some believe the name
comes from them. The Walloons were French-speaking Belgians who were
among the first European settlers, arriving in the New World as part of a
contingent hired by the Dutch West India Company.
A map of New Amsterdam, indicating the layout from about 1644, well before a wall was constructed.
MCNY
The real reasons for New Amsterdam building its famous wall are also
up for grabs. It’s commonly held that an original wooden palisade was
erected in 1644 in defense of Indian attacks, and certainly, the
residents of New Amsterdam did their part to rile the anger of the
native landowners.
Below: A fanciful illustration from Harper’s Magazine, 1908,
imagining New Amsterdam and the construction of the original ‘wall’.
But the Dutch had been living at the tip of Manhattan for over 25
years by the time the sturdier wall was built in 1653. In truth, it was
commissioned to keep out a different sort of enemy.
You’ll be pleased to know that director-general Peter Stuyvesant was the man who ordered the construction of the wall — in his words, “to surround the greater part of the city with a high stockade and small breastwork” — to replace the inadequate wooden barrier that had previously marked the city’s northern border.
A model of New Amsterdam made in 1933, clearly showing how sudden the city borders stopped thanks to the wall.
MCNY
This was an incredibly important year for New Amsterdam in two respects. In February 1653, New Amsterdam was chartered as an official Dutch city.
Although Stuyvesant was quite against the outpost receiving such official recognition, he eventually took advantage of it, appointing the first town council himself rather than putting it up to such trivial inconveniences as elections.
But in 1653, the tides of the motherland spilled onto their shores as the war between England and the Netherlands threatened the remote and undefended new city.
The Dutch intended to launch ships from New Amsterdam harbor in a battle against the English.
As a result, the English colonies up north were sure to retaliate,
either by sea or, feared Stuyvesant, over land, possibly teaming with
hostile Indian forces, down through undefended Manhattan island.
Essentially, the wall that helped give us Wall Street was built
because Stuyvesant feared attacks not just from Indian tribes, but from
the European colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Haven!
Looking at this more well-known map of New Amsterdam – the Costello Plan of 1660 — one can see the two gates very clearly.
Stuyvesant called upon the 43 richest residents of New Amsterdam to
provide funding to fix up the ailing Fort Amsterdam and to construct a
stockade across the island to prevent attacks from the north, while it
took New Amsterdam’s most oppressed inhabitants — slave labor from the
Dutch West India Company — to actually build the wall.
The barrier was constructed out of earth, rock, and 15 feet timber planks sold to the Dutch, ironically enough, by the “notorious“ Englishman Thomas Baxter. In a turnabout that one would expect from hiring your enemy, Baxter later led a group of “Rhode Island marauders“ and pirated Dutch fishing ships.
Early in the 1660s, the Dutch upgraded its wall to include brass
cannons and two sturdy gates — one at today’s intersection of Wall and
Broadway (for land), the other at Wall and Pearl Street (according to an early account, a water gate and access to a ‘river road’).
Below: A detail from a map of New Amsterdam’s eastern side,
clearly showing the water gate, and an illustration from 1908 of that
eastern gate:
Internet Archives Book Images
The British took over New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York,
but the wall still remained, becoming more a relic than a serious
defense.
By the turn of the century, the fear of land attacks had almost completely subsided and the city was beginning to feel crowded. So in 1699, the wall was torn down with some of the material salvaged to help construct a new City Hall at the corner of Nassau Street and the newly christened Wall Street.
In 1711 a slave market was built on Wall Street along the eastern shore, remaining there until 1762.
When the British were forced out in 1783 by the Americans, the City Hall building was finally renamed Federal Hall — the first official center of American government.
A plaque honoring the old wall sits today at the corner of Wall and Broadway, where the gate to the city once opened:
Wall Street bombing explosion - Overturned auto and crowd (Photo NY Daily News via Getty Images)
On a usual day, lunchtime down on Wall Street today is chaotic mess of brokers and bankers on cell phones, tour groups, messengers on bikes, police officers, construction workers, people delivering lunch and perhaps a stray older lady walking her dog.
One hundred years ago today, in 1920, it would have practically been the same, sans the cell phones.
So it’s particularly disturbing how easy it is to imagine the noontime scene on September 16, 1920.
An unidentified man led a horse and carriage down the congested street, fighting to get past crowds, until it rested at the corner about 100 feet east of Broad Street. As theTrinity Church bells rang, the man dropped the reins and fled, never to be seen again.
One minute later, the wagon exploded with 100 pounds of dynamite, eradicating everything in its sphere, then sending dozens of iron slugs through the air to create a horrific scene of carnage.
From the Sun and New York Herald
The best way to really tell this story is to quote a few contemporary accounts from the New York newspapers. NOTE: Some of the accounts are quite graphic.
A 22-year-old woman named Ella Parry survived and was interviewed by the Evening World:
“The glass of our windows fell into the office and the ceiling fell all about us. Where I had just been sitting was covered with heavy plaster. I did not wait to get my hat, but with others rushed into the street.
There were not less than a dozen dead persons on the sidewalk in front of tour building and the Sub-Treasury. Some of them had their faces almost completely blown off and their clothing had either been blown from their bodies or burned off. The police threw sheets over the bodies as fast as they could get them.”
“I was just about to enter the Morgan Building when the concussion knocked me down on the sidewalk. I arose after I had collected my thoughts and saw broken glass covering the street. All about me men and women were lying bleeding.
Above fifty feet down Wall Street there was an auto in a mass of flames. Across the street from it there was a shattered wagon and a horse lying dead. I saw several men cut almost in half from the large plate glass which fell from the building.”
“Not a sound pane of glass remained in the Morgan Building. Screens of copper mesh which were set inside the windows were bent and twisted but had fulfilled their mission of protecting those within.
Fragments of the glass dome above the main office lay on the floor, and one of these, or some similar bit of falling debris, is believed to be responsible for the single death that occurred there. The streets were covered with broken glass, some of it finely powdered, like sugar.
The heroic statue of Washington on the steps of the Sub-Treasury was not so much as scratched by the explosion, and stood firmly, with hand outstretched in a quelling gesture.”
One unusual story of bravery emerged the following day. A teenage office boy named James Saul grabbed a random automobile and began driving injured victims to the local hospital. Fearing the owner of the automobile was among the injured, he then drove the car to a police station.
By the end of the day, 38 people would be dead from the attack, many while sitting at their desks. (An additional man with a “nervous condition” would take his own life due to the event, making the total 39.) And over 400 more would be injured.
Below: The late edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “A mysterious explosion, disastrous in its effect, occurred at noon today on Wall Street, killing more than a score of persons and injuring hundreds.”
Following the attack, the Madison Avenue mansion of J.P. Morgan (site of the Morgan Library and Museum) was heavily guarded. Morgan himself was actually in England, enjoying a relaxing vacation.
With a little morbid imagination and some amateur CSI work, one can probably trace the trajectory of wall’s injuries to the very spot where the poor horse and wagon exploded.
Below: Crowds gather to witness the destruction.
Despite a federal investigation which led to dozens of arrests, in fact the culprits were never caught.
Largely assumed to be Italian anarchists, any evidence was unfortunately lost when, in an effort to appear unfazed, the city cleaned the street and kept Wall Street open for business the next day, even seeing a rally of thousands pour into the street that Friday.
PODCAST There would be no New York City without Peter Stuyvesant, the stern, authoritarian director-general of New Amsterdam, the Dutch port town that predates the Big Apple.
The willpower of this complicated leader took an endangered ramshackle settlement and transformed it into a functioning city. But Mr. Stuyvesant was no angel.
In part two in the Bowery Boys’ look into the history of New Amsterdam, we launch into the tale of Stuyvesant from the moment he steps foot (or peg leg, as it were) onto the shores of Manhattan in 1647.
Stuyvesant immediately set to work reforming the government, cleaning up New Amsterdam’s filth and even planning new streets. He authorized the construction of a new market, a commercial canal and a defense wall — on the spot of today’s Wall Street. But Peter would act very un-Dutch-like in his intolerance of varied religious beliefs, and the institution of slavery would flourish in New Amsterdam under his unwavering direction.
And yet the story of New York City’s Dutch roots does not end with the city’s occupation by the English in 1664 — or even in 1673 (when the city was briefly retaken by a Dutch fleet). The Dutch spirit remained alive in the New York countryside, becoming part of regional customs and dialect.
And yet the story of New Amsterdam might otherwise be ignored if not for a determined group of translators who began work on a critical project in the 1970s……
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every other week. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.
Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
And join us for the first ever Bowery Boys Movie Club, an exclusive podcast provided to our supporters on Patreon. This month’s selection — Taxi Driver.
We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far.
The Costello Plan, New Amsterdam 1660. Surveyed by Jacque Cortelyou. Full size photograph of manuscript map in the Biblioteca Medicea-Laurenziana of Florence, Italy. The Castello plan is the earliest known plan of New Amsterdam, and the only one dating from the Dutch period. Wikicommons.
New Amsterdam in miniature at the Museum of the City of New York, photographed in 1932
Museum of the City of New YorkPeter Stuyvesant tearing the letter demanding the surrender of New York. Artist Howard Pyle, 1923. New York Public Library
The moment when New Amsterdam became New York, depicted in a 1914 picture book.
The old Stuyvesant mansion, near First Avenue, engraved for the N.Y. Mirror newspaper. Courtesy NYPL
We didn’t go too deeply into it in our latest show, but the Bronx also has a very rich Dutch history. The name even comes from a (unfortunately doomed) Dutch settler.
The early history of Broadway begins in New Amsterdam.
We also spoke about the ‘rattle watch’ in our show on the New York Fire Department.
Something so giddy and wild as New York City in the Jazz Age would have to burn out at some point. But nobody expected the double catastrophe of a paralyzing financial crash and a wide-ranging government corruption scandal.
Mayor Jimmy Walker, in a race for a second term against a rising congressman named Fiorello La Guardia, might have had a few cocktails at the Central Park Casino after hearing of the pandemonium on Wall Street in late October 1929.
The irresponsible speculation fueling the stock market of the Roaring 20’s suddenly fell apart, turning princes into paupers overnight. Rumors spread among gathering crowds in front of the New York Stock Exchange of distraught traders throwing themselves out windows.
And yet a more immediate crisis was awaiting the Night Mayor of New York — the investigations of Judge Samuel Seabury, steering a crackdown authorized by governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rid New York City of its deeply embedded, Tammany Hall-fueled corruption.
With the American economy in free fall and hundreds of New York politicians, police officers and judges falling to corruption revelations, the world needed a drink! Counting down to the last days of Prohibition….
PLUS: The fate of Texas Guinan, the movie star turned Prohibition hostess who hit the road with a bawdy new burlesque — that led to a tragic end.
The song featured in this week’s episode was Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”
The Bowery Boys: New York City History podcast is brought to you …. by you!
We are now producing a new Bowery Boys podcast every two weeks. We’re also looking to improve the show in other ways and expand in other ways as well — through publishing, social media, live events and other forms of media. But we can only do this with your help!
We are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month.
Please visitour page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans.If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a sponsor.
We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far. And the best is yet to come!
Arnold Rothstein — His murder would kick off a frenzy in New York’s organized crime syndicates and lead to an in-depth investigation into the police and local government
Al Smith — His unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1928 led him to pursue more business-related projects, including the construction of the Empire State Building.
Harris & Ewing collection at the Library of Congress.
Mayor Jimmy Walker felt invincible at the start of his second term
Texas Guinan eventually left the nightclub scene and returned to film and stage work. She’s pictured here in 1931 in Paris. She would later be denied entry into the country for her bawdy performances (at least, that’s what she claimed).
Getty Images
Betty Compton waited patiently for Walker from the sidelines, watching as his political fortunes collapsed in 1932.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt — The governor of New York (and soon president of the United States) went after corruption during a busy campaign season.
Library of Congress
Fiorello La Guardia (pictured here in 1929) was an early supporter of Prohibition repeal and ran for mayor in 1929, losing to Walker.
Library of Congress
Samuel Seabury, questioning a nonplussed Jimmy Walker on the stand, succeeded in rooting out corrupt officials in public offices. With Roosevelt’s help, he even brought down the Night Mayor himself.
Getty Images
The Central Park Casino transformed into a swanky nightclub in 1929, a favored spot for Jimmy Walker
Courtesy New York Times
An interesting view of mid-Manhattan in 1931 (from St. Gabriel’s Park at First Avenue and 35th Street) with the newly completed Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building nearly completed.
MCNY/Byron Company
An ominous image of the New York Stock Exchange from September 1929, weeks before the crash.
Irving Underhill/MCNY
The streets outside the New York Stock Exchange were clogged with people for days, frantic scenes of anger, panic and heartbreak.
29th October 1929. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
New York Daily News
(Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
A graphic look at the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
Wikicommons
Outside Vancouver’s Beacon Theatre on October 28, 1933, just a week before her death here in this city.
CORRECTION: Jimmy Walker’s second term began on January 1, not January 3.
For more information, check out the following books:
Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City by Michael A. Lerner
The Great Crash by John Kenneth Galbraith
Once Upon A Time In New York by Herbert Mitgang
The Man Who Rode The Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury by Herbert Mitgang
Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series by David Pietrusza
The comedy legend Charlie Chaplin was born 125 years ago today in London, so I thought I’d use the opportunity to re-post one of my favorite photographs of Wall Street.
In the 1918 photo above, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks draw tens of thousands to Wall Street and the foot of the United States Sub Treasury building (i.e. today’s Federal Hall) to drum up support for World War I war bonds (or, more precisely, Liberty Bonds).
The United States had entered the conflict the prior year, on April 6, 1917, and began selling bonds to raise funds for the war effort. Although many Americans were caught up in a patriot fervor, war bond sales were initially quite weak. Most Americans in the late 1910s had never bought a bond of any kind.
To promote sales, the government began enlisting celebrities from several fields of entertainment, most notably motion pictures. Since the New York area was filled with film stars — Hollywood not yet being the center of the film business — its streets were soon filled with dutiful movie stars, extolling the patriotic and moral virtues of supporting their county through bond sales.
My favorite instance of this was the sale of doughnuts — considered a symbol of wartime — on the street by glamorous movie stars like Martha Mansfield. The Sub Treasury building, New York’s largest bond repository, was often the center of such rallies and fund drives. (There were even doughnut auctions held on the steps here.) It made sense to bring the biggest stars to the Sub Treasury to drum up the most publicity.
Chaplin threw himself into the war effort, embarking on a nationwide tour to promote the sale of bonds. That year he would make a propaganda film called The Bond:
But there may have been a bit of self-promotion in his appearance at the Sub Treasury. His filmA Dog’s Life would conveniently open in movie theaters five days later.
People weren’t used to hearing their movie stars speak in 1918. “I never made a speech before in my life,” he proclaimed through a megaphone that noon, standing in front of the statue of George Washington. “But I believe I can make one now.”
The dashing Fairbanks — known for swashbucklers and romances — happily broke character, goofing around with Chaplin to the delight of the crowd. “Folks, I’m so hoarse from urging people to buy Liberty bonds that I can hardly speak.”
“It was difficult for the lay ear to determine whether Chaplin or Fairbanks got the most enthusiastic reception. But there one was feature that got more than either. That was the combination of Chaplin and Fairbanks. The later carried the former around on his shoulders, and the 20,000-odd crowd howled with delight.”
Afterwards, Fairbanks and vocalist Harvey Hindemeyer led the crowd in a rendition of “Over There,” the American war anthem written by Broadway impresario George M. Cohan the previous year. (The story behind that song was featured in our podcast on the birth of the Broadway musical.)
Mary Pickford was also on a war bonds tour through America at this time. The following year, Pickford, her secret lover Fairbanks, Chaplin and the film director D.W. Griffith would start the film studio United Artists.
The U.S. Sub Treasury Building — today’s Federal Hall — as it appeared in a colorized postcard in the 1900s (courtesy NYPL) “Hey! Getcha buffalo nickels here. Only 15 cents!”
On March 1, 1913, the usual bustle of Wall Street was enlivened with the voices of young men — mostly messenger boys, bank runners and peddlers, according the Evening World — with handfuls of shiny new nickels, the first run of what would become known as the Indian Head nickel or the Buffalo nickel. And in these heady morning hours, many managed to sell the five-cent piece for triple its value.
“The down-at-the-heels men, who sell picture postcards and neckties from pushcarts on Ann Street, scented a bargain and hurried to the Pine Street El Dorado to sink their little capital in nickels.” The “Pine Street El Dorado” in that quote refers the New York Sub Treasury building, later referred to as Federal Hall. (It’s second entrance is on Pine Street.) The Sub Treasury received $10,000 worth of new nickels in ten wooden kegs.
Unfortunately for these budding young nickel entrepreneurs, the novelty wore off by noon and the Buffalo nickel sunk back down to its original face-value cost.
The new nickels were designed by the sculptor James Earle Fraser, a former assistant of the estimable Augustus Saint-Gaudens and best known in New York perhaps for his equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History.
Fraser, a professor at the Art Students League, designed the new coin from a studio at 3 MacDougal Alley, off of Washington Square Park. An admirer of Western and Native American imagery, Fraser used a series of models for the noble Indian profile on the front of the coin. For the buffalo on the reverse side, Fraser reportedly went to Central Park Zoo and used their old buffalo Black Diamond for a model.
At right: James Earle Fraser in 1912 with a clay model of a Theodore Roosevelt bust (courtesy National Cowboy Museum)
Or at least, Black Diamond has always been considered the model for the buffalo nickel. In fact, Fraser may also have used specimens from the Bronx Zoo including a fiesty beast named, appropriately, Bronx. Given the renown of the Bronx Zoo collection — the institution essentially saved the buffalo from extinction — it might have made more sense to use their animals as models.
Despite outcries from manufacturers of coin operated devices — who claimed the new five-cent piece would not fit in their machines — the buffalo nickel was minted in February 1913, replacing the Liberty Head nickel that year. (A small handful of Liberty Heads were made in 1913, becoming some of the most prized coinage among the numismatic set.) Americans got a preview of the new coin when a small number were distributed by President William Howard Taft at the groundbreaking for the National American Indian Memorial in Staten Island, a monument that was ultimately never built.
A week later, on the first day of March, rolls of the new buffalo nickels were distributed to New Yorkers on Wall Street, and millions more sent across the country for distribution.
Perhaps Fraser’s design was a tad too whimsical for some. The term ‘buffalo nickel’ soon became slang for something nearly worthless. Just a month later, the New York Sun reported, “[T]he $1,500 mathematical job didn’t mean anymore to him yesterday afternoon than a buffalo nickel.”
In 1921, one of Fraser’s human models, the chieftain Two Guns White Calf, pitched his teepee atop the luxury Hotel Commodore next door to Grand Central Terminal in a publicity stunt.
The buffalo nickel was replaced in 1938 by the more familiar Thomas Jefferson model.
Below: A news clipping featuring an image of Two Guns White Calf with his daughter. (Courtesy Flickr/sharknose)
Above: A fanciful painting of Captain Kidd in New York Harbor, by Jean-Leon Gerome Ferris, 1911. Notice Fort James (former Fort Amsterdam) and the adjoining windmill in the background
In this week’s podcast, I refer to New Yorker and Trinity Church benefactor William Kidd as one of the most notorious pirates of the Atlantic Ocean. Now I feel that might have been a bit of slander.
It is true that Kidd, forever known to generations of seafarers as Captain Kidd, was vilified by the British for illicit profiteering and eventually hanged in London on May 23, 1701. But Kidd himself fought off the charges voraciously, and today historians believe Kidd was scapegoated and was himself following orders of the governor of the New York colony himself — Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont. Yes, the man who tried to annul the charter of Trinity Church!
I’ll save the details of Kidd’s exploits for various pirate-themed blogs. Kidd may have been prosecuted unfairly, but the legend that arose around his real or imagined exploits makes him one of New York City’s most notorious residents of the 17th century. Not only was Kidd one of early New York’s most wealthy residents, but almost without question he had one of the best views in the city from his bedroom.
According to historian Richard Zacks, New York was “the pirate port of choice in the English colonies in North America” in 1690s, with its rich harbor and its relatively multi-cultural port. Still a volatile colony amongst England’s land possessions, it was easy to walk around without harassment and recruit other like minded scallywags for upcoming jobs.
Below: A fanciful sketch by artist Howard Pile (dated Nov. 1894) for Harpers Magazine, with fort and windmill also in background [source NYPL]
Kidd was an employee of the Crown, a privateer essentially hired to capture pirates and any foreign vessels that got in England’s way. He was based in New York for many of the same reasons more illicit sea captains were here — opportunities, money and a suitable harbor for his vessel (Kidd’s was called the Adventure Galley).
He came to New York in 1691 and soon married Sarah Oort, a woman with extraordinary bad luck. Her first two husbands had died, one at sea, and after Kidd’s execution, she would then marry a fourth time. William and Sarah would have two daughters who would marry well into New York society despite their father’s notoriety.
Despite his career, Kidd was considered a respectable New York gentleman — much, I imagine, because of his wife’s standing from her prior two marriages. Also, their digs weren’t bad. Although the Kidds owned several properties (again, thanks to Sarah), their primary residence was at the 119 Pearl Street, at the corner of Hanover and Pearl streets, a location which would have been waterfront property back in the day. It was also closely situated to Hanover Square, New York’s retail district and later home of the colony’s first newspapers.
The sizable home was located next to New York’s old wall, a fortification that would be ripped down within the decade and replaced with the street named after it. Kidd’s home is pictured below (i.e. the big white one):
The Kidds home was especially lavish for the time, with “104 ounces of silverware,” a healthy wine cellar and the biggest Turkish carpet in the city. Their wealth would have made them candidates for a pew at the newly built Trinity Church in 1696. Although Kidd provided equipment to help build the church, it appears Kidd himself never worshipped there. (His wife Sarah most likely did.)
Virtually no traces of this era exist in downtown Manhattan today, and the land extension east and the skyscrapers built there eradicate the view the Kidds would have had from their home.
Over a hundred years later, at the same address lived a man named Jean Victor Marie Moreau who would also influence world history: he’s best known as one-time right-hand-man of Napoleon Bonaparte, banished for betrayal in 1804 and sent to America, where he lived for a time at 119 Pearl.
You can read a nice, lengthy piece about Kidd and his New York connections here at Maritime History.
Above: The seemingly unchanged Trinity in 1916, already dwarfed by skyscrapers
PODCASTTrinity Church, with its distinctive spire staring down upon the west end of Wall Street, is more than just a house of worship. Over three different church buildings have sat at this site, and the current one by architect Richard Upjohn is one of America’s finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture.
The church collected Manhattan’s upper crust for decades and functions as one of the city’s most powerful landowners. Listen to our short history on the New York institution and find out who’s buried in their famous churchyards — Founding Fathers, inventors and a whole lotta Astors.
___________________________________ Clarification: In discussing the religious make-up of late 17th century New York, we failed to clarify that there were many Anglicans that already lived in the city but were not associated with the Church of England. These “English dissenters” belief systems were similar to the Anglicans but they disagreed with state meddling into religious affairs. ___________________________________
Fire Walk With Me: Below is a 19th century illustration of the ruins of the first Trinity Church, gutted in the fire of 1776 which subsequently destroyed one quarter of the entire city. The remains sat for many years undisturbed, and a second church would only be rebuilt after the British were expelled from New York. [NYPL]
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Snowed In: The second Trinity church, built on the same spot as the first, sat for over four decades until weight from massive snows during the winter of 1836 weakened the roof to such an extent that the entire structure had to be demolished. [NYPL]
Another view of the second one (dated 1830), looking down Broadway. Trinity’s distinctive spire was already considered the city’s most recognizable landmark.
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Third Times A Charm: Richard Upjohn’s Gothic Revival masterpiece was the tallest building in New York from the time it opened in 1847 (the date of this lithograph) until 1890, when it was finally usurped by the New York World building. [NYPL]
The same view, from 1903, as the city morphs rapidly around Trinity.
Witness to the September 16, 1920, terrorist bombing in front of JP Morgan’s….
…and the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. [courtesy Sacred Destinations] ___________________________________
Looking good from all sides. [Courtesy Sound Mind]
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Below is the Trinity Building from 1911. This is the replacement of a building that once stood here that is commonly considered New York’s very first office building. That five-story building, also designed by Upjohn, stood here for about fifty years and was demolished in 1904 to make way for the Beaux-Arts beauty standing there today.
Lunchtime down on Wall Street today is chaotic mess of brokers and bankers on cell phones, tour groups, messengers on bikes, police, construction workers, people delivering lunch and the stray old lady walking her dog.
Eighty-eight years ago, in 1920, it would have practically been the same, sans the cell phones. So it’s particularly disturbing how easy it is to imagine the noontime scene on September 16, 1920. In fact, most of the surroundings — the Stock Exchange, the Sub-Treasury building (today’s Federal Hall), and most importantly J.P. Morgan’s headquarters on 23 Wall Street — are still very much active.
An unidentified man led a horse and carriage down the congested street, fighting to get past crowds, until it rested at the corner about 100 feet east of Broad. As the Trinity Church bells rang, the man dropped the reins and fled, never to be seen again.
One minute later, the wagon exploded with 100 pounds of dynamite, eradicating everything in its sphere, then sending dozens of iron slugs through the air to create a horrific scene of carnage. I’ll let other sites outline some of the grimmer details, but by the end of the day, 38 people would be dead from the attack, many while sitting at their desks. And over 400 more would be injured.
Believe it or not, evidence of this attack can easily be seen from the street today. Morgan famously rejected repairs of his bank, preferring to leave the dents and pockmarks on the side of his building in a sign of defiance. With a little morbid imagination and some amateur CSI work, one can probably trace the trajectory of wall’s injuries to the very spot where the poor horse and wagon exploded.
Despite a federal investigation which led to dozens of arrests, in fact the culprits were never caught. Largely assumed to be Italian anarchists, any evidence was unfortunately lost when, in an effort to appear unfazed, the city cleaned the street and kept Wall Street open for business the next day, even seeing a rally of thousands pour into the street that Friday.
We steal this week’s topic straight for today’s headlines! We look at the early days of New York finance and the creation of the New York Stock Exchange, beginning with Alexander Hamilton, some pushy auctioneers, a coffee house and a sycamore tree.
And find how this seminal financial institution ended up in its latest home — that beautiful, classically designed George Post building, with a marble goddess on top who was almost too heavy for her own good.
The streets and ports of New York in 1790s, setting for America’s first financial crisis and the birth of the New York stock trading system. At the far left is the Tontine Coffee House.
This slight little man is William Duer, former assistant secretary of the treasury, whose shiftless manipulation of the early American financial system got him thrown in debtors prison for life
An illustration of the Buttonwood Agreement, which formed the loose collection of brokers who would form the New York Stock Exchange
The Tontine Coffee House (that building with the balcony) where the stock market meets a good coffee bean
A sketch of Wall Street in the mid 19th century. (You can see Trinity Church and a hint of Federal Hall to your left.) The Stock Exchange headquarters floated around from place to place during this period until an elegant Italian Renaissance style building was built for it in 1863
A kind of rough drawing to be sure, but this supposedly depicts the inside of the trading floor from the 1863 building. Sorry to say I couldn’t find any images of the outside, but the John Kellum designed building sounds like it was a beauty.
Another illustration of the new Exchange itself, taken from a membership note
George Post’s masterful Stock Exchange building, mustering up his finest Beaux-Arts instincts in ways that created a solid, powerful structure for an institution sometimes without such stability
Looking down Wall Street in 1911. By this time a “financial district” was firmly in place as bank offices, brokerage firms and other moneyed interests flock around the Stock Exchange. (This awesome picture is courtesy Shorpy, quite possibly my favorite website in the world.)
Looking down at the Stock Market as it was crashing in 1929.
Crowds outside the Stock Exchange, with George Washington looking down from the steps of Federal Hall
The trading floor from the 1950s
Crazed traders in 1963 (from photographer Thomas O’Halleran)
One of the most powerful street corners in the world
Due to the crush of monstrous buildings all around it, the Stock Exchange sits in a virtual canyon
All sorts of people have rang the opening bell at the Stock Exchange, including P Diddy….
Who knew a produce exchange could look so elegant?
One of New York’s most important architects was George B. Post, but you would barely know it today.
Only a handful of his most important buildings — the New York Stock Exchange being the most famous — still stand, the victim of a rapidly changing city sweeping away the former glories of the Beaux-Arts style.
Post wasn’t your typical purveyor of the sometimes gaudy excesses of Beaux-Arts, that amalgam of classical and formal styles that dictated American architecture from the 1880s into the 1920s. He was known for making its particular beauty climb, refitting its graceful symmetry literally to new heights. Post proved that the merely traditional needn’t be staid and uninspiring. My two favorites of long-gone works:
New York World Building
His best known building during his life was the New York World building on Newspaper Row, more appropriate referred to as the Pulitzer building after the paper’s imperious publisher Joseph Pulitzer. It was the tallest building in the world when it was completed in 1890 and was the first building to rise above the spire of Trinity Church.
This was demolished to make way for a car ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge:
You wouldn’t expect a building made to hold produce to be an architectural marvel, but Post graceful talent at creating lively open spaces made this one, at 2 Broadway down at Bowling Green, a stunner and certainly must have recommended him as the ideal candidate to design the trading room floor at the New York Stock Exchange. The Produce Exchange was wiped out in 1957. (The exterior is shown up top.)
(Picture above, and others of Post’s work, can be found at City Review, reviewing a book of Post’s work by Sarah Bradford Landau.)
If you’d rather see one of his few existing ones, simply cross the Williamsburg Bridge over to the Brooklyn side, turn left and look for that beautifully domed and very out-of-place beauty that’s now an HSBC bank branch. That’s the Williamsburgh Savings Bank, the little brother of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower and one of Brooklyn’s most beautiful buildings, built in 1875, many years before the bridge sprouted up in front of it:
A simplistic but colorful view of “Man Mados” or “New Amsterdam” in 1664 (click in to inspect the detail)
One of the first facts you learn as a student of New York City history is that Wall Street, that canyon of tall buildings and center of the American financial world, is named for an actual wall that once stretched along this very spot during the days of the Dutch. The real story is rather fuzzied by the presence of a small community of French-speaking Belgians known as the Walloons.
The original ‘De Waal Straat’ was the center of a small Walloon community in New Amsterdam. There was most definitely a walled fortification nearby on New Amsterdam’s northern boundary, and it certainly did stretch along about the same area as Wall Street does today.
But the present name seems to be a formation of mixed meanings that only a tangle of languages and hundreds of years of history can create. The Dutch themselves referred to an actual street alongside the wall as the ‘Cingel’ — according to an old history, meaning “exterior, or encircling, street.”
The real reasons for New Amsterdam building its famous wall are also up for grabs. It’s commonly held that the wooden palisade was erected in defense of Indian attacks, and certainly the residents of New Amsterdam did their part to rile the anger of the native landowners. But the Dutch had been living at the tip of Manhattan for over 25 years by the time the wall was built in 1653. In truth, it was commissioned to keep out a different sort of enemy.
You’ll be pleased to know that one-legged director-general Peter Stuyvesant was the man who ordered the construction of the “high stockade and small breastwork” that cleaved the Dutch community from the natural wilds beyond.
This was an incredibly important year for New Amsterdam in two respects. In February 1653, New Amsterdam was chartered as a official Dutch city. Although Stuyvesant was quite against the outpost receiving such official recognition, he eventually took advantage of it, appointing the first town council himself rather than putting it up to such trivial inconveniences as elections.
But in 1653 the tides of the motherland spilled onto their shores, as the war between England and the Netherlands threatened the remote and undefended new city. The Dutch intended to launch ships from New Amsterdam harbor in battle against the English.
As a result, the English colonies up north were sure to retaliate, either by sea or, feared Stuyvesant, over land, possibly teaming with hostile Indian forces, down through undefended Manhattan island. Essentially, the wall that helped give us Wall Street was built because Stuyvesant feared attacks not just from Indian tribes, but from the European colonies of Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Haven!
Above: looking at this more well known map of New Amsterdam, once can see the two gates very clearly
Stuyvesant called upon the 43 richest residents of New Amsterdam to provide funding to fix up the ailing Fort Amsterdam and to construct a stockade across the island to prevent attacks from the north, while it took New Amsterdam’s most oppressed inhabitants — slave labor from the Dutch West India Company — to actually build the wall.
The barrier was constructed out of earth, rock, and 15 feet timber planks sold to the Dutch, ironically enough, by the “notorious” Englishman Thomas Baxter. In a turnabout that one would expect from hiring your enemy, Baxter later led a group of “Rhode Island marauders” and pirated Dutch fishing ships.
Early in the 1660s, the Dutch upgraded its wall to include brass cannons and two sturdy gates — one at today’s intersection of Wall and Broadway (for land), the other at Wall and Pearl Street (according to an early account, a water gate and access to a ‘river road’).
The British took over New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York, but the wall still remained, becoming more a relic than a serious defense.
By the turn of the century, the fear of land attacks had almost completely subsided and the city was beginning to feel crowded. So in 1699 the wall was torn down with some of the material salvaged to help construct a new City Hall at the corner of Nassau Street and the newly cristened Wall Street. When the British were forced out in 1783 by the Americans, the City Hall building was renamed Federal Hall — the first official center of American government.
A plaque honoring the old wall sits today at the corner of Wall and Broadway, where the gate to the city once opened:
Of all the people who lived in New York City during the Revolutionary War, of all the great Americans who helped shaped history here in the city, [cue deep-voiced announcer] only one can be called America’s first U.S.-born saint.
Commuters who zip on and off the Staten Island ferry and tourists gallivanting through Battery Park probably skip past the red brick Federal Style structure across the street, which serves as a church on Sundays and a rare reminder of early history on other days. Frankly, even been an unusually geeky history buff like myself, I have rushed by this building at least a hundred times before realizing what it was.
But it was here that Elizabeth Ann Seton, the charitable Catholic woman who became New York (and America’s) first saint, in honored in a shrine whose presence has helped save a spectacularly unique building.
Seton’s actually from Staten Island (born August 28, 1774) but lived in the house here for a few years. Whether or not you believe in the holy powers of the sainthood, you can definitely say that Seton’s former presence here saved this extraordinarily out-of-place home from the wrecking ball.
This home, originally built in 1794 by wealthy merchant James Watson, once stood with a row of similar Federal Style buildings facing a harbor clogged with shipping vessels.
NYC Architecture has some fantastic photos of the the Watson home’s former neighbors. Seriously, how this place somehow remained standing over the years is a testament to the sometimes random choices of the flippant New York real estate world.
Seton, born a protestant, became Catholicized at the former St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street but made her name in Maryland by founding the Sisters of Charity, America’s first congregation of nuns. Seton’s strong draw to religious fate is attributed to living in New York City during its yellow fever epidemic of the late 19th century.
She was canonized on September 14, 1975. Seton Hall University, among many schools, is named in her honor.
Elizabeth Ann Seton fun facts:
— Like the cast of Gossip Girl, Elizabeth Seton was born into a prominent New York family and hobnobbed with the elite — which, in Revolutionary era New York, was centered at Trinity Church
— Seton and her family lived upstairs at 61 Stone Street, where her husband ran a business into the ground, and they were evicted. Although the original building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1835, today the space is occupied by the cute Wall Street Inn on one of the most picturesque streets in downtown Manhattan.
— After confirmation, she slapped a Mary in front of her name thus Seton would later sign everything merely with the initials M.E.A.S.
